Workshops

All the members of Black Hair are experienced workshop leaders.We have worked in schools, colleges and arts centres, with the very young and with those with special needs.

We like to base ourworkshops around devised music theatre, beginning from scratch. But we have also given many composition workshops, rehearsing and developing pieces composed by students.

Some recent examples of Black Hair workshops:

In November this year we worked with 20 postgraduate students at the University of York, and with them devised a one hour programme of music theatre. The students were mostly performance students or composers, but in this project we insisted that all contributed equally to the creative process and to the performance, in an attempt to break down the conventional barriers between composer and performer. We also insisted that all the work should be performable without written scores, so there was a large element of improvisation. Some delightful material resulted, and one or two of the pieces created over the short three week period of the project will be developed later in the year. One at least is being developed as a written score by one of the composers. There are some photographs of the project here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kishimoto/tags/blackhair/

In Rotherham in 2006 we collaborated with local amateur theatre company Open Minds Theatre, in a project which culminated in an openpublic workshop combining musioc, dance and theatre, as part of the RotherhamArts Festival. View Gallery

In May 2008 the ensemble was in residence at Dartington College of Arts, in Devon. Here the group divided into two teams.One team workshoppedstudent compositions at the college, while the other team spent two days in asecondary school in Plymouth, where they devised a short programme of musictheatre pieces which combined physical movement with text based compositionscreated by the students.The threeday residencey culminated in a concert as part of the Dartington Arts Concerts Series.